If you have a plain drab website and would like to spiff it up a bit; add a video to your website to stand out from your competitors.
Currently, by far the hottest form of media on the web are videos. 
Anyone can easily learn how to add a video to your website, and if you already know how to obtain and add graphics, the task becomes much easier.
First of all, there can be no doubt that videos are the most important form of content on the Internet.
They literally put your website into motion and can be used in your business many ways.
Videos can easily be incorporated into your online business as blog content, as teaching tutorials, as an intro video, as a video sales letter, to explain your checkout procedure, to personalize your guarantee, to explain the email opt-in process, for testimonials, as a squeeze page video, as an exit pop video, or for whatever other idea you can come up with.
Streaming video keeps getting better and most Internet users can now stream video.
Here are some ways to add a video to your website.
- Add a video to your website from a third party source as an embedded video.
This is the easiest way to place videos on your website. There are hundreds of sources that have videos for syncication, including many good niche websites.
Or, you can use free video hosts like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Tangle, Revver, etc. to select a video for embedding.
All you do is copy the embed code and paste it in your website or blog page.
A word of caution; when you’re editing a YouTube video post in WordPress, make sure that you uncheck the “use the visual rich editor when writing” box in your user profile before pasting the video embed code in your wysiwyg editor. If you don’t, your video will look and act crazy when you publish it online.
You can Google “embedding a Youtube video on a WordPress blog” to get help learning how to edit or customize the embedded movie player, or to teach you how to get the code from the various video hosts and copy it to your website.
- Add a video to your website using your personally produced live video
This method is complicated and can be very expensive to shoot, transfer, edit, and encode depending on which way you decide to go.
You can use a relatively inexpensive Flip Video camera, or webcam that costs anywhere from $30 to $290. 
Or, you can go the professional route and buy a $4,000 High Definition camera, $1,200 Final Cut Studio, a $600 Adobe Flash to produce your own HD videos.
You can embed your videos by whichever method you use to produce them, by simply uploading it to YouTube or some other video hosting site, and then copying the code to your website.
The downside to this method is that you have links to the video host, which make your videos look less professional.
- You can add a video to your website by converting it to flash yourself, and then embedding it.
There are several free tools such as FLV Producer Lite, or JW FLV Player, that you can use to accomplish this.
If you plan on producing a lot of heavy video streaming, you might consider a dedicated server to host your files.
- You can add a video to your website with your own screen capture video.
This method is great for producing video tutorials and is an extremely effective marketing tool.
To make your own screen capture videos, you can get the free version of Camtasia from http://www.camstudio.org.
A better version for a relatively low cost is CamStudio Pro.
The full version of Camtasia Studio will cost you about $300.
Techsmith, the maker of Camtasia Studio, makes a neat tool that creates screen capture videos on the fly. You can get it at jingproject.com if you’re interested.
All of the versions have video tutorials that explain how to use the software along with recommended settings to use.
You now know the basics of how to add a video to your website to stand out from your competitors.
There are basically five commandments for a working website you need to know when creating your website.
Because people on the Internet visit countless websites on a daily basis, they already have their own opinions formed of how a website should look. Therefore, you have to present the best first impression possible to your visitors with your website that you can.
Here are five commandments for a working website that will give you the best possible start right out of the box.
- First Commandment – Always think like your consumers.
Remember that you too are a consumer and should know how important it is to locate products online when shopping.
Organize your website into different relevant categories, and make sure that your customers can easily find what they are looking for, by placing products in more than one category.
Give your consumers several ways to find what they are looking for on your website.
- Second Commandment – Illustrate Your Products Exactly
Use professional looking photos to illustrate your products. Photos will instantly tell the consumer a lot about the product they are looking for.
Most consumers only scan the descriptions; so keep the headlines brief and keep sentences short. Your detailed summaries should not be more that 20 or 30 words long.
- Third Commandment – Don’t Be Tempted To Load Up Your Website With Unnecessary Media
Flashy is not always the best policy. Often too much media and fancy transitional effects can become a distraction to consumers. They can cause your website to becomes less effective at keeping your consumers attention on what you are offering them.
Blingy special website effects often cause slow upload times and can delay your customer’s product search. Slow loading web pages often cause consumers to leave a website altogether.
- Fourth Commandment – Keep It Simple
Don’t complicate purchasing for your consumers. Display all pricing and shipping information clearly and make sure that your check out procedure is simple. Don’t create unnecessary check out steps or add unneeded pages that only complicate the procedure.
You can reinforce your consumers confidence in you by including your phone number, email address, and return policy clearly on your website.
- Fifth Commandment – Continuously Promote Your Online Business
Websites do not market themselves. You need to continually promote your online business if you expect to succeed online.
Keep in touch with your customers with newsletters, or special offers, so they don’t forget you are there. Always keep an open mind and think outside the box.
You can try targeting new markets, and optimizing your content as you continue growing. You need to continually promote your online business if you intend to have a successful ecommerce website.
When it comes to improving website usability, these five commandments for a working website will make your ecommerce website hum.
You should really consider how you can increase your online profits using upsells and one time offers, if you plan on becoming a successful Internet marketer.
Upsells and one time offers can be found almost everywhere online. With an upsell, you simply ask your customer to upgrade their original purchase to either a larger purchase, a more refined product, or to make a secondary purchase.
Burger King, Best Buy, various car rental companies, WinZip, and many other types of software, are some examples where marketers commonly upsell their products. Buying a tool or car warranty, is an examples of an upsell.
Depending on which way you look at it, upsells and one time offers can be either the extension of your front end offer, or the start of your back end offer.
Although most businesses make the majority of their profits from back end offers; you can increase your profits up to 300% by using upsells and one time offers.
There is nothing wrong with upselling if it is done ethically and gives a benefit of some sort to your customers. Unfortunately some online marketers upsell in an unethical manner and cause problems for the rest of us.
It’s important to remember that a good upsell should always benefit your customer.
When you try to sell your customers something else they might be interested in buying; the technique is called cross selling. Cross selling is similar to upselling; and both cross selling and upselling will increase your online profits when done correctly.
One time offers, also know as OTOs, are as the name implies, presented only once to your prospect. They get one opportunity to take advantage of your offer once.
It’s a “get it done now” or “forget it forever” offer, that when done correctly, will have your prospect “chomping at the bit” to purchase your offering.
The most effective one time offers will cause your prospect to feel like they are missing out on a special deal, or bargain, if they don’t immediately purchase your offer.
Effective one time offers will put your prospects in a buying mood, and will create a sense of urgency in them. That is precisely why they work so well.
Any sales letter can be transformed into a one time offer by adding some script to track both cookies, and IP address.
You can have a custom coded website script with this function created for you by a professional programmer, or you can use prewritten scripts that can be found using a Google search.
If you haven’t already done so, creating upsells and one time offers, incorporating them into your sales process, and implementing them; will demonstrate exactly how effective they can be in increasing your bottom line.
